Lentil Soup

“The lentil soup recipe,” he says, as I am pacing up and down the kitchen with my phone’s ear piece in.

“But Pete,” I interject,” I have all kinds of soups frozen right now, chicken and grilled corn, roast squash and garlic, gazpacho…none of it? Just that one soup? You are telling me that your broke butt is so flush that you don’t need some of these freshly frozen, hand made soups for free?”

Pete is my dad’s best friend and he lives up on the mountain and doesn’t get down very much to buy food, and generally buys processed food. I had just made a big batch of soup from duckspoon’s lentil soup recipe and frozen it in single-serve, quart size bags. Soups can be very economical to prepare and freeze for use, and I generally keep a stack of frozen soups on hand.

As much as I love cream soups, they don’t freeze well. Sometimes it would be nice to whip out a crab bisque instead of whipping out the lentil soup recipe or the chicken chowder. Chowders don’t freeze well with the potatoes in them either. The potatoes break down and make the soup kinda starchy. It’s best to freeze just the basic soups and add what you need to as you reheat them.

My dad’s lentil soup recipe is by far one of the most economical, healthy and easy soups to keep on hand in the freezer. I use the freezer because I don’t often get a chance to spend an hour or two in front of the stove preparing dinner. Instead I prepare it in advance, a cooking binge I guess. Pork shoulder, whole chickens, bags freshly made from the lentil soup recipe all inhabit my freezer out in the garage…all at my disposal.

The lentil soup recipe is a symbol of duckspoon.com’s mission statement: to teach folks how to cook good, inexpensive food and feed their family healthy meals. You can learn to fabricate a turkey out, or butcher a whole hog, or even how to 5$ dinners to feed a family of four. My dad’s lentil recipe soup is a perfect example of that.